V C Chandhirakumar
Credit: X/@PTI
Chennai: Tamil Nadu’s ruling DMK scored yet another win under Chief Minister M K Stalin by posting a resounding victory in the by-elections to Erode (East) assembly constituency, amid a boycott by the principal Opposition AIADMK and BJP.
Naam Tamizhar Katchi (NTK), the only established political party that contested against the DMK, garnered over 15.59 per cent of the polled votes though its nominee forfeited deposit.
DMK’s V C Chandhirakumar, who jumped the ship from late Vijayakant’s DMK in 2016, trounced NTK’s M K Seethalakshmi to clinch the seat by a wide margin of 91,558 votes by polling 1,15,709 votes. The victory margin on Saturday was about 24,000 votes more than the difference of votes between E V K S Elangovan of the Congress and his AIADMK rival K S Thennarasu in the 2023 bypolls.
Though she lost the deposit amount, Seethalakshmi polled 23,810 votes, which is quite impressive for NTK, whose vote percentage in the 2023 bypoll was less than 10 per cent. Interestingly, as many as 6,079 voters had chosen the None of the Above (NOTA) option in the by-elections.
This is the second time that Erode (East) faced a bypoll in two years – in 2023, Congress incumbent Thirumahan Evera’s death led to the election of his father E V K S Elangovan, who passed away in December 2024. Since the DMK expressed to contest the bypoll, the Congress ceded the seat.
Political analysts believe NTK could have increased its vote share further if its chief S Seeman hadn’t made Dravidian legend E V R Periyar, who hailed from Erode, as one of the key election issues. Seeman had launched a frontal attack against Periyar, revered by crores of Tamils across the globe, and he only increased his tempo against the legendary leader during the campaign for the bypolls.
BJP chief K Annamalai wondered whether Seeman criticised Periyar “too much” and asserted that the bypoll has once again shown that attacks against the legend doesn’t have the “power” to change the results.
Stalin aptly credited Periyar for the DMK’s “resounding victory” in the bypolls saying everyone who contested against the party had lost deposits in “Periyar’s land.”
“People reposed trust in me in 2021 by electing the DMK to power. I have been working for the past three-and-a-half years to keep up people’s trust in me,” Stalin said in his first reaction to the results.
The DMK President and Chief Minister expressed the hope that Saturday’s success will be repeated in the 2026 assembly polls which will witness the return of the party to power for a record seventh term.
However, Leader of Opposition and AIADMK general secretary Edappadi K Palaniswami alleged that the DMK has won the election by rigging votes of the AIADMK cadre in favour of the ruling party’s nominee.
The Erode (east) by-election will go down as one of “noiseless” and less talked about in Tamil Nadu’s chequered history of snap polls. Though this is not the first time that opposition parties have boycotted the bypolls, the absence of key players saved the DMK of its financial and human resources.
Allegations of “heavy” bribing of voters with cash and household articles haven’t made headlines, no frenzied campaigning by the entire DMK cabinet, and no election rallies of high-profile leaders weren’t witnessed in Erode.
Bypolls in Tamil Nadu have always tilted in favour of the ruling party, be it the DMK or the AIADMK, since the 1990s, with wide-spread allegations of bribing the voters. In fact, Tamil Nadu is probably the only state that has witnessed maximum rescinding of elections between 2016 and 2019 due to heavy bribing of voters.
It has been the practice of the party in power to pool in all its resources to register a victory in the bypolls to demonstrate its hold over power, but many of these parties have tasted defeat in the general elections. The only two exceptions were in 2019 when the DMK won 13 of the 22 seats that went to bypolls and the victory of T T V Dhinakaran as an independent from R K Nagar in December 2017.